Produced By: Francis Ford Coppola Sees A “Live” Future For Film

Francis Ford Coppola can see the future of cinema, and it’s going to be “live,” like a digital play or a virtual opera. Speaking before an overflow crowd at the closing of the Producer Guild‘s Produced By conference, Coppola said he sees a future in which movies will be presented “live” to audiences all around the world at the same time.

With the digital revolution, he said, “movies no longer have to be set in stone and can be composed and interpreted for different audiences that come to see it. Film has always been a recorded medium,” but live cinema remixes might be “30 percent pre-recorded as the actors do it live. You can do anything and you can do it live.”

Coppola said he might even essay such a “live” movie himself. Coppola, who is currently writing a saga about multiple generations of an Italian-American family (ed.: why does this somehow sound familiar?), said, “Maybe I should put my money where my mouth is and do it live.”

The Godfather of American cinema said that he is “very optimistic about the future of cinema and the world,” and he’s especially bullish on independent filmmaking. “If not for independent filmmakers,” he said, “all we would have would be these big industrial films. The cinema is too important to allow industry high finance to stop it. Cinema is too big to be defeated.”